Post-what? Extractive industries, narratives of development and socio-environmental

Transcription

1 Post-what? Extractive industries, narratives of development and socio-environmental disputes across the (ostensibly changing) Andean region Denise Humphreys Bebbington and Anthony Bebbington 1 Forthcoming in H. Haarstad (ed.) 2012 New Political Spaces in Latin American Natural Resource Governance" (Palgrave Macmillan) Introduction Lima, 2011: A colleague begins a post-graduate seminar on extractive industries by presenting students, drawn from across Latin America, with a series of quotations on the relationships between extraction, development strategy and society. The quotations are unlabeled, though the students are told that they come from Latin American presidents and vice-presidents, representing political positions ranging from the self-consciously neoliberal to the ostensibly post-neoliberal. The task was to assign the quotations to these politically very different leaders. The success rate was not high. The point, of course, was to suggest that extractive economies can do strange things to politics, reining in the possibilities of innovation even under progressive government. We ourselves have used a similar strategy elsewhere, exploring executive statements to suggest that the practical governance of extractive industry across neoliberal and post-neoliberal contexts shows far less variation than might be expected (Bebbington and Humphreys 1 Very many people in Latin America, Europe and North America have helped make this paper possible though none are implicated in its argument. In particular we are grateful to Håvard Haarstad for his patience, and to the Ford Foundation and Economic and Social Research Council for financial support at different moments. 1

2 Bebbington 2011; Bebbington 2009, 2012). To make such an argument, however, is to operate on doubly treacherous ground. First, executive statements cannot be taken to reflect the full diversity of government policy (though they do surely reflect important dimensions of its political conceptualization). Second, to suggest that new-left governments, even those with celebrated links to social movements, might reveal significant similarities to authoritarian neoliberal regimes is to invite criticisms that can range from conservatism to disloyalty and essentialism (see McNeish, this volume). Yet, regimes that are now populated by the analyst s friends and allies should be no less subject to critique than those regimes from which the analyst feels a self-conscious distance. A change of actor does not necessarily lead to a change of script, and one cannot necessarily take self-declared harbingers at face value. What changes, and what remains the same, is an empirical question the answer to which lends itself to theoretical interpretation. Others have noted the same point. Again for the case of extractive industry governance, Gudynas (2010) asks the region s post-neoliberal governments If you are so progressive why do you destroy nature? Dagnino s (2007) more general exploration of the perverse confluence is a similar statement of concern regarding the perverse ability of Brazil s Worker s Party government to combine participation in social programs together with sustained neoliberal management of economy and much of society. More poignantly still, the resignations of Ministers and Vice-Ministers reflect practical critiques of political projects with which they had once identified: one need only think of the resignation of Alberto Acosta, the President of Ecuador s Constituent Assembly (2007 to 2008), José de Echave, Peru s Vice-Minister of Environment (2011) and Cecilia Chacón, Bolivia s Minister of Defense (2011). 2

3 In this chapter we develop further this line of analysis with a particular focus on two phenomena; the continuing presence of socio-environmental conflict across very different political regimes in the Andean region; and the palpable convergences in the ways in which these different regimes approach the question of extractive industry and the trade-offs among extraction, rights and environment. While we would not claim that the governments of Alan García (Peru), Ollanta Humala (Peru), Evo Morales (Bolivia), Rafael Correa (Ecuador) and Juan Manuel Santos (Colombia) are the same, we do argue that in their management of the extractive economy they reveal some striking family resemblances (Peck 2004: 395). Likewise, while we note some of the diverse motivations that appear to underlie disputes over extraction we draw particular attention to the continuity of those disputes over time and across regime transitions. We reject, tajantemente, the notion that this continuity reflects on-going manipulation by political actors (c.f. Caballero 2010). Instead we suggest that for some civil society actors this continuity reflects sustained frustration at the ways in which certain rights and approaches to the governance of nature and space are privileged over others, as well as at the ways in which the macro-economy has failed to generate employment and new livelihood opportunities. Of course, for certain movement leaders additional motivations might also be at play when they organize protest they may use extractive industry conflicts to broaden their political authority and seek access to rents, or they may deploy strategic essentialisms as a means of pursuing specific material ends. Nonetheless, we would argue that these types of motivation remain insufficient to explain the decisions that broad segments of the population have repeatedly made to dedicate significant resources to protest and to make themselves vulnerable at the moment of open protest. Something else is going on. 3

4 Part of our argument is that such continuities across different regime types, over time and across space, reflect the sheer political economic weight of the extractive economy. One part of this weight is a historical heritage, and in this sense there is path dependence to government strategy in the region. This may or may not be a fully-blown resource curse, but at the very least such path dependence reflects the fiscal and political constraints within which governments operate and which have structuring effects on their action. Another part of this weight is more contemporary, and reflects the actual and potential scales of investment that are at stake. These (actual and imagined) investments create (actual and perceived) incentives and opportunities that are attractive for governments of the moment who have few other (easily imaginable) sources of short- and medium-term fiscal revenue. We suggest that this combination of constraint and incentive has led governments of different hues to commit to the promotion of extractive industry as the central pillar (or in the language of the current Colombian national development plan, locomotive ) of economic growth. This pillar is then seen as the revenue source for financing programs of social protection and social investment. This model of extractive growth plus redistributive social spending recurs across different regimes. There is some irony here for this model bears resemblances not only to Dagnino s perverse confluence but also to the World Bank s 1990 recipe for poverty reduction (World Bank 1990), a recipe that combined private sector led growth, public investment in human capital, and social safety nets. Beyond irony, the troubling face of this policy convergence has been the predisposition towards authoritarian imposition of the model combining occasional use of force with efforts to delegitimize those who question extraction. This policy disposition has, in turn, lead to social conflicts some rights based, some socioenvironmental, and some purely redistributive. In particular it has led to difficult relationships 4

5 with indigenous populations seeking forms of justice that, while evidently having an economic and livelihood component, extend way beyond the mere redistribution of wealth to be derived from extraction or the forms of political representation that are embodied in contemporary postneoliberal governments. While some might read such struggles as a fight for broadened and decolonized concepts of nature, culture and community (Escobar 2008), here all we wish to assert is that they appear as struggles for rights, citizenship and the ability to exercise at least some control over political economic processes in their territories. The remainder of the paper proceeds as follows. Next we offer a brief discussion of the context, nature and scope of the extractive industry economy in the region. We then explore currents in government policy and in particular executive statements regarding extraction, development and rights to protest. As part of this discussion, we trace some of the conflicts between government and indigenous populations to which this policy orientation has given rise, and then go on to a slightly broader discussion of the nature of conflicts over extraction. This discussion emphasizes that there are multiple axes of dispute in these conflicts. These axes make clear that what has occurred over the last two decades should not be understood in terms of heroes and villains (though we would also suggest there are some of each in all these conflicts), but rather in terms of contradictions and transformations. We briefly explore some of the possible routes through which such transformations might emerge, with particular focus on how far they might lay the bases of future institutional frameworks in the region. Whether these frameworks will mitigate or aggravate injustice is an open question. What seems clearer is that the way in which this question works itself will not map neatly onto the contemporary differences among political regimes in the region. 5

6 A New Extraction Beginning in the early 1990s, the Andean-Amazonian region has been the terrain of a new and aggressive phase of expanded investment in the mining, oil and gas sectors. Three broad factors drive this expansion: growing global demand for minerals, oil and natural gas (especially from China, India and other emerging economies), coupled with sustained price increases, have offered new investment opportunities and made low grade, poorly accessible and difficult to extract deposits viable; technological changes have made it possible to extract dispersed ores as well as hard to access hydrocarbons; and a series of policy and institutional changes have provided favorable tax, royalty and regulatory environments for investors (Bridge 2004). This has induced expanded investment in new frontiers that have no modern history of large-scale extraction as well as in traditional regions of extraction. Investment has moved to traditional extractive economies (e.g. Chile and Peru for mining, Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia for hydrocarbons) as well as to countries with little such history (e.g. hard rock metal mining in Ecuador, Argentina, Colombia and El Salvador, hydrocarbons across Central America). Meanwhile within the Andean countries, investment has flowed not only to traditional mining regions (e.g. Potosí, Oruro and Cerro de Pasco) and hydrocarbon frontiers (Loreto, Tarija, Pastaza) but also to new ones. The last fifteen years have seen important mining projects in Piura, Apurimac and Ayacucho in Peru, as well as new hydrocarbon frontiers opening up in the altiplano of Peru, the northern lowlands of Bolivia and the South-east of Ecuador. By the end of the 2000s, the NGO Cooperacción estimated that some 55 percent of Peru s highland peasant communities were affected by mining concessions, and that between the area under concession increased 77.4 percent (from over 7 million hectares to

7 million hectares). Meanwhile in Peru s Amazon basin, the proportion of land affected by hydrocarbon concessions increased from 14 percent to over 70 percent in under five years ( ), overlapping with protected areas, indigenous territories and lands reserved for indigenous peoples (Chase-Smith, 2009). While only 10 percent or so of Ecuador is affected by mining concessions, this is still remarkable given that the country has no significant mining history. Meanwhile some 65 percent of its Amazon basin is concessioned or available for hydrocarbon exploration (Finer et al. 2008). According to Bolivia s National Hydrocarbons Agency (YPFB 2011) just under fifty percent of Bolivia s territory is deemed of potential interest for hydrocarbon exploration. In Colombia, between 2002 and 2009, the area covered by mining concessions increased from just over 1 million hectares to 8.44 million hectares (Rudas 2011). While overlaps with formal indigenous territories are less extensive (North South Institute 2002), those with environmentally protected areas are considerable: if in 1990 only 74 titles overlapped with protected areas, by 2011 the figure was 785 (Rudas 2011). Extraction and development policy: a regional narrative? It would be a step too far to suggest that some sort of regional extractive formation had emerged in the Andean region. That said, various authors (Eduardo Gudynas, Maristella Svampa, Alberto Acosta etc.) have suggested that something of this might be going on. Such a phenomenon might itself be taken to reflect on-going processes of regional integration. These are brought together most explicitly under the rubric of IIRSA, the Regional Initiative for Infrastructure Integration in South America. They are also manifest in the increasing regional projection of the Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES) and Brazilian companies specializing in extraction (e.g. 7

8 Vale, Petrobras) and large scale civil engineering (e.g. Odebrecht). While IIRSA does not focus specifically on extractive industry, many of its scheduled investments in roads, hidrovías (waterways) electricity distribution systems and ports exhibit many synergies with the extractive economy. These regional initiatives also suggest the constellations of power that might support the consolidation of a regionally integrated network of investments in extraction. In this sense, national political economy and policy dynamics cannot be understood separately from regional dynamics. This articulation between the regional and national might also provide another window on apparent national policy convergence around extraction. The following paragraphs discuss just a few elements of this convergence for regimes as apparently diverse as Peru under García and then Humala, Bolivia under Morales, Ecuador under Correa and Colombia under Santos. The general claim is that certain themes recur across these regimes policy and political narratives on extraction and development. These themes are: a commitment to expanding the extractive economy; a coupling of extraction and the financing of social programs; a criticism of protest and mobilization coupled with strategies to undermine protest through discursive delegitimation and/or the use of force; and a prioritization of national popular-political projects over sub-national or territorial projects. This prioritization is justified through an arithmetical notion of justice in which, if more citizens benefit from social investments funded by extraction than lose as a result of the dislocations caused by extraction, then the promotion of extraction is in itself fair, just and appropriate. Peru 8

9 In December 2007, President Alan García wrote his now infamous manifesto for a modern extractive economy under the banner of The Dog-in-the-Manger Syndrome. Carried by the main national daily, El Comercio, García s article argued that the main factors preventing Peru from entering into a full-blown Rostovian take-off phase of economic growth (Rostow, 1960) were linked to two main problems: a land and resource tenure system that favored collective property regimes (in particular protecting the collective rights of indigenous communities); and the networks of civil society organizations and environmental activists that sought to defend the rights of indigenous peoples and the environment. To García, these organizations represented the dog-in-the-manger on the one hand they sought to prevent large-scale capital from deriving value from resources under their control and on the other hand they were unable to transform these resources themselves. García (2007) lashed out against those he saw obstructing Peru s development, there are millions of hectares for timber extraction that lie idle, millions more that communities and associations have not, and will never, cultivate, in addition to hundreds of mineral deposits that cannot be worked. He argued that proposed hydrocarbon investments had been stalled because activists had created the fictive figure of indigenous peoples living in voluntary isolation: against oil they have created the image of the non-contact jungle native. García also decried efforts to question mineral development, barely a tenth of these resources are being exploited because here we are still discussing whether mining destroys the environment, an argument that held no sway with García who saw environmentalists as yesteryear s socialists now wrapped in green. García s vision of development for Peru centered on the role of modern technology, private property, large-scale capital, and a combination of both foreign direct and domestic investment as paramount a development process led by capitalists and in which the rest of the population would participate as beneficiaries. Indeed, 9

10 Chase Smith has argued that this was a manifesto for a clear project of state reform that leads to an ultra-neoliberal model oriented towards the concentration of land and natural resources in private hands (Chase-Smith 2009: 51). Shortly following García s statements, his office passed a torrent of decrees (Campondonico, 2008) under temporary powers granted to the Executive by the Peruvian Congress to draft and pass legislation for implementation of the Free Trade Agreement signed with the USA in Over one hundred decrees were issued within a six month period. Together these laws were perceived as weakening communal forms of property, of fomenting private investment in areas historically occupied and claimed by peasant and indigenous communities, and of strengthening the hand of the state in terms of pursuing its territorial projects in these areas. This in turn catalyzed an Amazonian strike led by indigenous organizations and involving river blockades and the occupation of hydrocarbon installations. That strike ended when the government agreed to revisit some of the laws, but when by 2009 government was still dragging its feet, indigenous organizations mobilized again. That mobilization culminated in a standoff between protestors and the police on a stretch of road outside the town of Bagua. By the end of the day, 33 people had been killed, including 23 policemen, 11 of whom had been held hostage at an oil pumping station and deliberately murdered by their Awajun-Wampis captors in retaliation for the shooting of indigenous people. The events of Bagua rocked political debate and everyday conversation, and absorbed pages in both the national and international press (e.g. Vidal 2009). In the months following, the government formed commissions to investigate events and convened dialogues with indigenous leaders to forge agreements. However at the same time, public prosecutors accused some of those indigenous leaders as being the intellectual authors of the deaths in Bagua. Indeed Alberto 10

11 Pizango, President of the Inter-Ethnic Association of Indigenous Lowland Peoples (AIDESEP) fled Peru for Nicaragua where he spent more than eleven months in exile. One post-bagua CNR report (2008) found that the Executive Office had exceeded and abused its power by decreeing a number of laws that had nothing to do with the Free Trade Agreement. Indigenous organizations, human rights groups and the Ombudsman office argued that some of these laws should have been subject to a consultative process under the provisions of Peru s Constitution and the ILO 169 and thus they were unconstitutional (Chase Smith, 2009; Rénique, 2009). The remainder of the García administration was characterized by a continuing commitment to extraction coupled with social conflict and periodic use of government force (as evident in the periodic reports on social conflict by the Human Rights Ombudsman s office: Arellano-Yanguas, 2012). Interestingly, however, the first six months following the installation of the center-left government of Ollanta Humala have suggested relatively little change either in the dynamic around conflict or in practical government policy. Notwithstanding early legislation on free prior and informed consent (legislation not uniformly supported within the government) and less than three months after taking office the Humala administration faced its first serious challenge when multiple protests broke out in October One of these conflicts, over Minas Conga, a mine in Northern Peru that would be Peru s largest ever single mining investment, culminated in confrontations between protestors (led in considerable measure by the regional government) and government forces. Speaking of the conflict on November 16, 2011 President Humala came out in support of the project, reiterating the argument that such projects were essential for Peru s development: Minas Conga is an important project for Peru, he said, because it will allow us to achieve the great transformation and the social inclusion that we are offering to the Peruvian people (Humala 2011). Though promising an improvement of the 11

12 project s EIA in response to protestors demands, Humala also declared a sixty day state of emergency in four provinces in the Department of Cajamarca and sent in troops to quell protests. Humala s Prime Minister, Salomon Lerner, subsequently resigned triggering the resignation of the entire cabinet and the replacement of several of the more left-leaning ministers with new ministers who are seen to be more conservative, and in some cases with military backgrounds (including the new Prime Minister). At the time of writing these are still early days for the Humala administration. The initial responses to the Conga conflict, however, already suggest a policy line being traced. Extractive projects will be supported even if regional populations express skepticism, because such projects are envisioned as providing essential financial resources to support social investments programs and social inclusion. Indeed, it would be difficult for the government to walk away from these investments and forgo the income produced through royalty and tax payments. If necessary, it appears, force will be used. Bolivia Whether they want it or not this highway is going to be built 2 President Evo Morales, June 29, 2011 On September 25, 2011, a coordinated police raid set upon a group of lowland indigenous marchers just outside the town of Yucumo. The marchers had been slowly making their way from the lowland town of Trinidad to the capital, La Paz in protest at the government s proposed plan to build a highway through the middle of a recognized indigenous territory and national 2 Original quote: Quieran o no quieran vamos a construir este camino 12

13 park (Territorio Indígena y Parque Nacional Isiboró Securé TIPNIS). They were caught completely off guard. Police lobbed tear gas into the makeshift camps to drive out the marchers, then subdued them and forcefully boarded them onto waiting buses and trucks. In the ensuing chaos, families fled into the forest to escape being caught and mothers and children were separated. March organizers were tracked down, bound and gagged, and then transferred into waiting vehicles. Images taken of the raid revealed the severe treatment that many marchers received at the hands of the Bolivian police. In its report on the events, the Bolivian Human Rights Ombudsman s Office concluded that police action had violated a series of human rights and was out of all proportion with the behavior of the marchers, that the state had also violated various constitutional rights, and that parts of the government had obstructed the process of the Ombudsman s investigation of the incident (Defensoría del Pueblo, 2011). At the heart of the conflict is the struggle over the development of a large region in the center of the country. The TIPNIS was first recognized as a national park in 1965 and later recognized as collective indigenous lands (Tierras Comunitarias de Origen, TCO). As in the case of Bagua, Peru, the TIPNIS conflict is embedded in longer processes of broad structural change that seeks to open vast, underdeveloped lowland lands for colonization, infrastructural development and investment. In September 2006, the newly elected Morales government, following the tactics of previous administrations, promulgated Law 3477 declaring the project a national and departmental priority and directing public authorities to proceed with the final study to complete the design and construction of a section of highway connecting the lowland towns of Villa Tunari (Cochabamba) with San Ignacio de Moxos (Beni) (Crespo 2011). As proposed, the 304 km. highway would split the Indigenous Territory and National Park in half, despite TIPNIS being formally protected by Bolivian Law. 13

14 Notwithstanding its priority status, the road project had initially been put on hold as the Morales government was forced to confront an internal rebellion launched by right-leaning groups (September 2008) and then see through the approval of the New Constitution (January 2009) and the election of the new plurinational assembly (March 2009). However, once these challenges were overcome the government turned its attention to the construction of the highway. In May 2010, indigenous Moxeño, Yuracaré and Chimán authorities of the TIPNIS gathered to discuss the proposed project and emitted a resolution steadfastly rejecting the construction of the highway Villa Tunari-San Ignacio de Moxos (Crespo, 2011). The indigenous resolution was in response to the government s unilateral decision to build the highway without following established legal and technical procedures, in particular, the environmental impact study and a process of free, prior and informed consultation (FPIC) in violation of Bolivia s new Constitution and international conventions. As the Morales/MAS government sought to move forward with the project, the Vice Minister of the Environment and a sub-director both resigned their positions after refusing to sign off on the environmental license (Plataforma Energetica, August 2010). While the trigger of the TIPNIS conflict is the proposed construction of the highway and its potential adverse impacts, in particular the concern that colonists would invade the TIPNIS, the road building project is linked to additional pressures on land and territory. These include potential hydrocarbon exploration and exploitation, logging and narco-trafficking interests (SERVINDI, 16 August 2011). Indeed in a report prepared by the Fundación Unir (2011: 18), the authors note that the Morales government has chosen to prioritize the construction of a highway and privilege the agenda of integration (linked to and promoted by the geo-political interests of its neighbor, Brazil), the expansion of the agricultural frontier, and the exploration 14

15 and exploitation of hydrocarbons, without due consideration of an alternative development agenda that prioritizes indigenous aspirations for territorial control and self governance or respects existing environmental legislation or broader concerns for environmental conservation. This reading of government approaches to development appears to be borne out by earlier statements that both the President and Vice-President have made regarding the centrality of the extractive economy to their political strategy. At different times Morales has asked out loud: What, then, is Bolivia going to live off if some NGOs say Amazonia without oil?. They are saying, in other words, that the Bolivian people ought not have money, that there should be neither IDH [a direct tax on hydrocarbons used to fund government investments] nor royalties, and also that there should be no Juancito Pinto, Renta Dignidad nor Juana Azurduy [cash transfer and social programs] (Morales, 2009). Once again, extraction is seen as essential for a social investment model in which the rights of the national many trump those of the subnational minority: necessity obliges us to exploit this natural resource, the gas, the oil, for all Bolivians. If there s oil, gas, you know it is for all Bolivians and this money that we collect from oil, from gas, has to go to all Bolivians (Morales, 2009). Vice Minister García Linera is yet more to the point: Is it mandatory to get gas and oil from the Amazonian north of La Paz? Yes. Why? Because combined with the right of a people to the land is the right of the state, of the state led by the indigenous-popular and campesino movement, to superimpose the greater collective interest of all the peoples (García Linera, 2009). Some analysts (see McNeish in this book, Fuentes 2011) insist that these confrontations in Bolivia cannot be reduced as if this were a simple debate between an ideal form of indigenous communitarianism populated by noble savages and the government s pursuit of untrammelled desarrollismo. Quite so, though this is hardly the point. The issue is less one of divergent 15

16 environmentalisms and instead one of competing notions about rights and democracy. The question that these conflicts pose is whether minorities, localities or even natures have any special rights within the post-neoliberal model being constructed by the MAS government, or whether the calculi for political economic decisions should be ones that simply tally winners and losers and allow the Executive to determine which rights count more and which less. To invoke the noble savage critique seems little more than to repeat and endorse the arguments the Executive Office uses to dismiss criticisms of its policy. Ecuador After assuming power in January 2007, Ecuador s president Rafael Correa spoke of his new government as bringing the country out of its long neoliberal night, one of whose indicators had been the indiscriminate granting of mineral licenses with immensely favorable conditions for license owners. Initially, Correa s government appeared to target the extractive sector as one in which it was going to prove its post-neoliberal credentials and craft new ways of governing the economy and natural resources. Indeed, the first Minister of Energy and Mines, Alberto Acosta, declared a commitment to a different way of managing oil. This proposal hinged around the sensitive field of Yasuní-ITT (Ishpingo Tambococha Tiputini), located beneath a protected area of great biodiversity and occupied by the Huaraoni and Ecuador s two remaining indigenous peoples living in voluntary isolation (Rival 2012). The government committed itself to pursuing an alternative proposal for the governance of ITT, in which the oil would be left underground if the international community guaranteed half the revenue that Ecuador would otherwise have received from the oil. This compensation would be placed in a trust fund that the Ecuadorian 16

17 government could then use for broad development purposes. The origin of this project is discussed in more detail in a later chapter in this book (see Certomá and Grey) as well as by Rival (2012). Correa and Acosta subsequently parted ways and since late 2008 Ecuador has seen both new legislation that is much more favorable to the large-scale mining sector and political initiatives that at a certain point threw the Yasuní experiment into doubt. Indeed, discrepancies over extraction were an important part of the tensions between Correa and Acosta. While Acosta was presiding over a Constituent Assembly process in 2008 that explored novel ways of regulating and restricting extraction, Correa was publicly delegitimizing such ideas and at certain times intervened directly in Assembly working groups and processes. An Assembly devised Mining Mandate that raised many questions about large scale mining was soon replaced with legislation that would allow such mining (Moore and Velásquez, 2012), and indeed in 2011 the government gave the go-ahead for the country s first large scale open-cast mine in the South- East of the country. As Correa was making the case for extraction he was also denigrating those who questioned the wisdom of such opening up new frontiers for large scale mining. The ecologists are extortionists. It is not the communities that are protesting, just a small group of terrorists. People from the Amazon support us. It is romantic environmentalists and those infantile leftists who want to destabilize government (Correa 2007). While questioning protest, he sought to protect investors: I ll say it again, with the law in my hand, we will not allow such abuse, we will not allow uprisings that block roads that attack private property (Correa 2008). One again the rationale was that these subsoil resources are a revenue stream that cannot be ignored for government policy: It s absurd to be sitting on top of hundreds of thousands of millions of 17

18 dollars, and to say no to mining because of romanticisms, stories, obsessions, or who knows what (Correa 2008). As the executive s commitment to extraction hardened, the Yasuní-ITT initiative also encountered problems. In January 2010, Correa rejected a long negotiated deal that had been brokered by his own government with the UNDP, Germany, Spain and others that would have secured about half of the money required for the trust fund. Correa argued that donors were attaching too many conditions to the use of these monies. If that is how it is going to be, keep your money and in June we ll begin to exploit ITT. Here we are not going to trade in our sovereignty (Correa cited in EFE 2010). Versions vary as to how far this breakdown was due to intransigence on the part of Correa or of the German minister and over the course of 2011 the government appeared to attempt to once again recover the process. Whatever the case, however, the government is also clear that with or without Yasuní, oil development will continue, and the mining sector will be promoted. Colombia The Colombian context differs from that of the other three Andean countries in that it has not undergone any sort of shift to a left of center (far less post-neoliberal) government. Indeed, the authoritarian neo-liberalization that deepened under the Uribe government (from 2002 to 2010) has continued under the Santos administration. Though Colombia has long experience with large-scale extraction of oil and coal, in the metal mining sector the experience has been different. Notwithstanding the country s pre-colonial and colonial history of metal mining, large-scale extraction of metals is only a recent phenomenon (though there is a longer history of 18

19 coal mining). The Uribe administration promoted extractive industry as part of this model with a new Mining Code that weakened regulatory institutions, weakened territorial rights and led to increasing overlaps among titles to extract and other legal interests in land. The Santos government has intensified this commitment, and its National Development Plan (for 2010 to 2014) identifies five motors for economic growth of which mining is by far the most significant, set to account for 54 percent of all anticipated private investment and 41 percent of that public investment designed to promote growth. These policy changes the modification of mining codes, the promotion of foreign investment and privatization initiatives, the regulation of consultative processes have led to problems related to territory, environment and impacts on agricultural communities, indigenous and afro-colombian communities (North-South Institute, 2002). This has driven more conflict, with the number of conflicts increasing from 16 between 2003 and 2006 to twenty-nine between 2007 and In some cases where communities have resisted extractive industry investments (eg. the Embará in Mandé Norte) physical force has been used. While once again the Colombian model appears as one that combines the promotion of extraction, social investment and authoritarian repression it is also characterized by countermovements that are yet more striking than the strength of the Peruvian and Bolivian Ombudsman s offices. Thus the Colombian Constitution of 1991 drew special attention to the ethnically and culturally diverse nature of the country and in turn granted certain rights to the bearers of this diversity. The Constitution laid the basis for recognizing that indigenous peoples had a right to territory, to cultural identity, to self-determination, to self-government and to exercise their own forms of governance and justice, and the North South Institute has noted that Colombia boasts one of the most progressive frameworks for ethnic rights protection in the 19

20 world even if it is often the case that rights are not held up in practice (North-South Institute, 2011). That said, in 2010, the Constitutional Court passed a ruling (T-1045A) that requires free prior and informed consent on mining projects in Afro-Colombian territories, as well as plans to protect basic rights. We will return to the significance of this enigma. A common regional narrative of extraction and development? The general pattern across Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador and Colombia appears to be that central government and particularly the Executive Office is consistently promoting the expansion of extractive industry and regional integration, prioritizing national agendas over the territorial demands or livelihood concerns, and using discursive and/or material force in order to push this policy agenda through. Different tropes are used to justify hostility to those who question or oppose this agenda, and they run from the invocation of sovereignty, through the urgency and necessity and on to the denigration of critics as stupid, selfish, infantile, leftist, terrorist, corrupt and right-wing. While the willingness to use physical force shows more variation, with Bolivia, until recently showing more restraint, the determination to push the extractive frontier outwards is clear in all these countries. The ingenuous question must be why? One interpretation is that as García, Humala, Correa, Morales, García Linera and Santos survey their own macroeconomic prospects, each concludes that resource extraction is where their macro-economies main comparative advantage lies. They might also feel that revenue from extractive industry is easier to appropriate and control than are the more dispersed and difficult-to-tax revenues deriving from the smaller-scale, informal economy. Furthermore, such centralized revenues might seem an attractive means of 20

21 financing the sorts of centrally-provided state services that are more effective in generating political capital and votes than would be the case with more decentralized, bottom-up forms of development. Finally, it may be that these presidencies recognize the risks associated with extractive industry but feel that this time they can do things differently, and in that way appease movements concerns about government s ability to ensure adequate regulation of extraction, to protect citizens rights and to share the benefits of extraction more broadly. This said, while fiscal concerns may constitute one set of factors that lead towards expanded extraction, another is undoubtedly interest group and coalition politics. More perplexing is why such thinking so easily translates into authoritarianism and the use of force. One answer might be that these presidencies and their respective parties just happen to have authoritarian tendencies. Another answer might be that these regimes see extraction as their only option. This is worrying because it would speak to just how constrained they see their policy options as being and also because it would imply that they are gambling that their future will be different from their past. It is concern about just such scenarios that underlie a growing interest among civil society thinkers to imagine what post-extractive economies would look like. Conclusions The increasing levels of social conflict that have accompanied these government commitments to the expansion of extractive industry defy singular explanations. Our own research on conflict dynamics across a range of territories in the region suggest that protest has been driven by a range of motivations, anxieties, grievances, and tensions that are oftentimes exacerbated by and 21

22 intertwined with historical disputes (see Bebbington 2012, Humphreys Bebbington, 2010, and This combination of motivations suggests that the juxtaposition of greed and grievance in explanations of conflicts around extraction is an unhelpful simplification (Collier and Hoeffler, 2004, 2005; Caballero, 2010). Some protests and conflicts are best understood as responses to uncertainty and perceived risk. These conflicts typically manifest themselves subsequent to the granting of concessions to conduct exploration but prior to exploitation. In many instances these occur before any actual exploitation has occurred (e.g. much of Ecuador; Piura, Islay, Tambogrande, Puno in Peru; and Norte La Paz in Bolivia). A second group of protests seem more motivated by annoyance and frustration at actual dispossession. In these conflicts, grievances include the payment of very low prices for land that later prove to be immensely valuable, the drying up or actual contamination of water courses, the loss of territorial autonomy, or the loss of authority among local elites. A third set of conflicts reflects demands for opportunities. Here conflict is used as a way of forcing extractive industry to recruit their services locally or to provide local benefits of some sort. Fourth are mobilizations facilitated by political authorities, who may see them as a mean of enhancing their electoral prospects or of increasing the revenue that these authorities derive from extraction. If the factors that underlie protest are so diverse, several things become evident. First, extractive industry conflicts cannot be reduced to Manichean oppositions between good and bad, or between one set of interests and another. Instead, they can be better understood as the manifestations of different types of overlapping contradictions: among different forms of governing space, among different modes of property ownership, among non-compatible environmentalisms, among incompatible notions of the sacred and the culturally significant and 22

23 among claims on resources that cannot be satisfied jointly and simultaneously. Second, the conceptions of justice at play in these conflicts are multiple and not necessarily compatible. Hence any viable way forward will have to accommodate multiple conceptions of justice simply imposing the conceptions favored by the Executive (on the grounds that it is progressively post-neoliberal) will simply not do. Third, simple fixes are not likely to work in the medium term certain frustrations, aspirations and grievances will remain unattended by one-dimensional interventions. Fourth, and by implication, institutional innovations that stand any chance of providing medium term responses to these conflicts and their associated demands for different forms of justice will have to be flexible and most probably complex. This begs the question - where might such innovations come from, for some actor will have to produce them. From the discussions above, one thing seems evident the capacity for such nuanced and iterative innovation is not likely to be found in the offices of the Presidency. The recurrent tendency of the Executive towards imposition and authoritarianism is not a quality associated with flexible innovation. Social movements are clearly one of these pathways insofar as they exert the pressure that opens the political space that is essential for any viable innovation. Indeed, absent the sustained exercise of pressure, innovation will not occur. However, in the analyses of both our own and of most published work, such movements have rarely been able to turn their demands into actionable institutional changes that will deliver enhanced justice of one or another form. Other actors that have appeared in some of the vignettes reviewed in this Chapter have, however, achieved this. In this regard, the Colombian case becomes particularly interesting because even in a context of authoritarian neoliberalism and expanding extraction, significant progress has been made in recognizing diverse rights and in inscribing these recognitions in law. In this process the combined efforts of social movements, legal activists in 23

24 civil society and an equally activist Constitutional Court have been paramount. Routes in Peru have been somewhat different in that instance, the Human Rights Ombudsman has been especially important in creating legitimate spaces within which to discuss institutional change, and then to craft the outlines of such change. In Bolivia, there are nascent signs that the Ombudsman s office might come to play a similar role, even if the political space open to it is more limited. Looking across the (still limited) range of conflicts discussed in the prior section, the sorts of institutional change needed will have to address a range of issues and claims for justice. Some of these changes will have to relate to the administration of processes of consultation and consent prior to exploration (thus nipping in the bud the worst of risk-anduncertainty-induced conflicts), the planning of land use before and after exploration (so that existing forms of territorial governance are not systematically and inevitably displaced by the expansion of extraction) and the criteria on which benefits from extraction will be distributed both socially and spatially. They will also have to involve innovations in capital markets so that new forms of investment emerge in the regional economy that are able to offer forms of employment that do not depend only on extraction (none of the actors mentioned in earlier sections are particularly up to this vital task). Delivering this package of transformations will be no simple task, and careful social science understanding of how such innovation can occur and with what effects will be invaluable in helping illuminate the process. Social science also has a role to play in exploring and making explicit the diverse conceptions of justice that have affected, and continue to affect, the extractive economy in the Andes and Amazon. For what is palpably clear in these conflicts is that different social actors feel the weight of different injustices that they feel have been meted 24

25 out to them over the years. What is also quite clear is that extraction only ever has a chance of being just if it is governed in ways that recognize, from the outset, the co-existence of, and the need to attend to, diverse and equally legitimate conceptions of justice and perceptions of injustice. 25

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